Chris Lewis at the U of S

Home

Welcome to my homepage at the University of Saskatchewan.

This legacy site contains information related to
graduate course work I completed,
projects I was involved in,
and other activities while registered at the U of S. It is
unlikely to be updated with any frequency going forward.
-- Oct 30, 2011.

I was drawn to bioinformatics because biology is a fascinating subject.
There are so many really cool, complex natural phenomenon... many of which
seem to follow clearly defined rules - if only you can work them out. This
prompted me to approach my former grad studies supervisor (Tony Kusalik)
about an honors project in bioinformatics and ultimately landed me my
position at Agriculture and Agri-food Canada (AAFC).

(Un)Forutunately I didn't get to spend all of my time thinking about
little puzzles and one of my first tasks at Agriculture and Agri-food
Canada was to create a web based tool to display our Brassica
Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) in the context of Arabidopsis.
As one of the existing bioinformaticians was already tinkering with SVG,
I took a look at the technology and quickly became a fan... thank you
Steve.

In early 2004, I became a founding partner of Vectoreal, a web application
development company, which lasted 2-3 years. The other partners included
many of the best and brightest in the field of SVG and I count myself
privileged to have been included among them. This provided an opportunity
to work on several interesting contracts and gain valuable business experience.

Towards the end of 2004, I started a consulting company, Aurora Development
Ltd. to interact with Vectoreal and handle all related contracts. Through Aurora,
I supported one long term client and several smaller contracts over the years.
However, after 7 (mostly) incredible years, I've decided to scale back and put
consulting on-hold for the time being to re-focus. This is in large part
driven by recent developments at AAFC.

In 2006, an opportunity arose to move back to Ottawa and
work with the Mycology group at AAFC in the area of Biosystematics. Over the
past 5 years, I've established a bioinformatics support program for the
Mycology group, and have recently started to branch out to provide support to
other groups involved in Biodiversity Informatics at AAFC. This has involved
developing project, financial and human resource management skills and
significantly developing my system administration skills.

The AAFC biodiversity bioinformatics group is quite an exciting place to be at
the moment. Within the past year, 2 bioinformatics research scientists have been
hired in the biodiversity group, and several large projects have been approved
or are nearing approval. If things go as planned, this should bring in an
influx of additional technical talent, and open up a world of opportunity.
I can't wait to see where things go!